At last May’s unveiling of preliminary designs for the Obama Presidential Center in Jackson Park, Barack Obama voiced support for boldly reconfiguring the Frederick Law Olmsted-designed green space to make it more people friendly. The proposal calls for converting most of Cornell Drive, a road through the park that ballooned to six lanes during the urban renewal era, to parkland between 59th and 67th Streets to connect the presidential center site to the rest of the lagoon-filled natural area. A section of Marquette Road would also be removed to unify the two halves of Jackson Park Golf Course.
All told, there would be a net gain of three to five acres of green space. While the Chicago Department of Transportation hasn’t released an official cost estimate for the expansions, Mayor Rahm Emanuel has indicated that the widening of LSD alone would cost upward of $100 million, which he hopes to pay for with state funds.
Payne noted that the Gray Line would provide direct CTA train service from downtown’s Millennium Station to the MED’s 59th Street stop, just north of the Obama center. It could also reduce the number of car commuters on LSD and Stony Island. He added that the city’s and the foundation’s submitted plans for the campus offer “no type of improvements to public transit in the area—only road modifications.”
When I asked Obama Foundation spokesman Sam Michel whether the foundation has looked into beefing up noncar access to the center as an alternative to costly road expansion, he referred me back to Metra and the CTA.
